What do we know about the life and death of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev - a man who has truly become an idol for the older generation? What his commissioner Dmitry Furmanov told in his book, and even, perhaps, what everyone saw in the film of the same name. However, both of these sources turned out to be far from the truth. The destruction of the legendary hero of the Reds - V. I. Chapaev with the headquarters and a significant part of the considered invincible Red 25th Infantry Division, which crushed the famous Kappelevites, is one of the most outstanding and amazing victories of the White Guards over the Bolsheviks. Until now, this special operation, which should go down in the history of military art, has not been studied. Our today's story is about what actually happened on that distant day, September 5, 1919, and how a large detachment of Reds headed by Chapaev was destroyed.
Retreat
It was August 1919. On the Ural Front, the Cossacks, desperately resisting, retreated under the powerful onslaught of the 4th and 11th Red armies. The Soviet command paid special attention to this front, realizing that it was through the lands of the Ural Cossack army that it was easiest to combine the troops of Kolchak and Denikin, that the Ural Cossacks could keep under constant threat the connection between Soviet Russia and Red Turkestan, and that this area was strategically important, since it was not only a grain granary capable of feeding a large army, but also an oil-rich territory.
Ural Cossacks
At this time, the Ural Cossacks were in a difficult situation: most of its territory was under the occupation of the Reds and was devastated by them; a typhus epidemic was raging among the population and personnel of the troops, daily pulling out dozens of irreplaceable fighters; there were not enough officers; the army experienced a catastrophic shortage of weapons, uniforms, cartridges, shells, medicines, and medical personnel. The Ural Cossacks largely had to get everything in battle, since there was almost no help from Kolchak and Denikin. At this time, the Bolsheviks had already pushed the Whites behind the village of Sakharnaya, behind which the sandy, marginal lower reaches of the Ural River began, where there was nothing to feed the horses. A little more - and the Cossacks will lose their horses, their main strength …
"Adventure"
To try to find a way out of the situation, the chieftain of the Urals, Lieutenant General V. S. Tolstov summoned a circle of officers from hundred to corps commanders.
On it, the old commanders, led by General Titruev, spoke in favor of a conventional offensive operation, proposing to combine the equestrian units of the Urals from 3 thousand checkers in 3 lavas and attack the well-fortified village of Sakharnaya with 15 thousand red infantry, a large number of machine guns and guns. Such an attack across the steppe, level as a table, would have been a clear suicide, and the plan of the "old men" was rejected. They accepted the plan proposed by the "youth", which the "old people" called "an adventure." According to this plan, a small but well-armed detachment of the best fighters on the most enduring horses stood out from the Ural Separate White Army, which was supposed to secretly pass the location of the red troops, without engaging with them, and penetrate deep into their rear. Just as secretly, he had to approach Lbischenskaya stanitsa, occupied by the Reds, with a sudden blow to take it and cut off the Red troops from the bases, forcing them to withdraw. At this time, Cossack patrols caught two Red orderlies with secret documents, from which it became clear that the headquarters of the entire Chapaev group was located in Lbischensk, stores of weapons, ammunition, ammunition for two rifle divisions, the number of Red forces was determined.
According to Dmitry Furmanov, commissar of the 25th rifle division, "the Cossacks knew this and took this into account in their undoubtedly talented raid … They pinned very strong hopes on their operation and therefore put the most experienced military leaders at the head of the matter." The White Guard special detachment included the Cossacks of the 1st Division of the 1st Ural Corps of Colonel T. I. Sladkov and the White Guard peasants of Lieutenant Colonel F. F. Poznyakov. Combat General N. N. Borodin. On the campaign they ordered to take food for only a week and more cartridges, abandoning the convoy for speed of movement. The task before the detachment was practically impossible: Lbischensk was guarded by the Red forces up to 4,000 bayonets and checkers with a large number of machine guns, during the day two red airplanes patrolled in the area of the village. To carry out a special operation, it was necessary to walk about 150 kilometers across the bare steppe, and only at night, since the daytime movement could not have gone unnoticed by the red pilots. In this case, the further conduct of the operation became meaningless, since its success depended entirely on surprise.
The special squad goes to the raid
On August 31, with the onset of darkness, a white special detachment left the village of Kaleny to the west into the steppe. During the entire raid, both Cossacks and officers were forbidden to make noise, talk loudly, and smoke. Naturally, I didn't even have to think about any bonfires; I had to forget about hot food for several days. Not everyone understood the rejection of the usual rules of the Cossack military operations - dashing horse attacks with a whistle and boom with naked glittering swords. Some of the raid participants grumbled: “What a war, we sneak like thieves at night!..” All night, at high speed, the Cossacks went as deep as possible into the steppe so that the Reds did not notice their maneuver. In the afternoon, the detachment received a 5-hour rest, after which, entering the Kushum lowland, changed the direction of movement and went up the Ural River, being 50-60 kilometers away from it. It was a very exhausting campaign: on September 1, the detachment stood all day in the steppe in the heat, being in a swampy lowland, the exit from which could not remain unnoticed by the enemy. At the same time, the location of the special squad was almost noticed by the red pilots - they flew very close. When airplanes appeared in the sky, General Borodin ordered to drive the horses into the reeds, to throw branches and armfuls of grass over the carts and cannons, and lie down next to them. There was no certainty that the pilots did not notice them, but they did not have to choose, and the Cossacks had to march at nightfall in order to move away from the dangerous place. Towards evening, on the third day of the journey, Borodin's detachment cut the Lbischensk-Slomikhinsk road, approaching Lbischensk 12 versts. In order not to be discovered by the Reds, the Cossacks occupied a depression not far from the village itself and sent out patrols in all directions for reconnaissance and capture of "tongues". Warrant officer Portnov's departure attacked the Red grain wagon train, partially capturing it. The prisoners were taken to the detachment, where they were interrogated and found out that Chapaev was in Lbischensk. At the same time, one Red Army soldier volunteered to indicate his apartment. It was decided to spend the night that night in the same depression, wait out there for the day, for which to put yourself in order, to rest after a hard hike and wait until the alarm raised by the trips subsides. On September 4, reinforced patrols were sent to Lbischensk with the task of not letting in there and not letting anyone out, but not getting close, so as not to alert the enemy. All 10 Reds who tried to get to Lbischensk or leave it were caught by the crossroads, no one was missed.
The first miscalculations of the Reds
As it turned out, the red foragers noticed the patrols, but Chapaev did not attach much importance to this. He and divisional commissar Baturin only laughed at the fact that "they go to the steppe." According to red intelligence, fewer and fewer fighters remained in the ranks of the whites, who were retreating farther and farther to the Caspian. Naturally, they could not believe that the whites would venture on such a bold raid and would be able to slip through dense ranks of red troops unnoticed. Even when it was reported that an attack had been made on the train, Chapaev did not see any danger in this. He considered that these were the actions of one who had wandered far from his patrol. By his order on September 4, 1919, scouts - horse patrols and two airplanes performed search operations, but found nothing suspicious. The calculation of the White Guard commanders turned out to be correct: none of the Reds could even imagine that the White detachment was located near Lbischensk, under the noses of the Bolsheviks! On the other hand, this shows not only the wisdom of the commanders of the special detachment, who chose such a good place for parking, but also the negligent performance of their duties by the red reconnaissance: it is hard to believe that the mounted scouts would not meet the Cossacks, and the pilots could not notice them from a height! When discussing the plan for the capture of Lbischensk, it was decided to take Chapaev alive, for which a special platoon of lieutenant Belonozhkin was allocated. This platoon was given a difficult and dangerous task: to attack Lbischensk in the 1st chain, when occupying its outskirts, he had to, not paying attention to anything, together with the Red Army man who volunteered to show Chapaev's apartment rush there and grab the red divisional commander. Esaul Faddeev proposed a more risky but sure plan to capture Chapaev; the special platoon had to go on horseback and, quickly sweeping through the streets of Lbischensk, dismount at Chapaev's house, cordon off him and take the division commander asleep. This plan was rejected due to fears that most of the people and the horse staff of the platoon might die.
The capture of Lbischensk
At 10 o'clock in the evening on September 4, 1919, the special detachment set off for Lbischensk. Before leaving, Colonel Sladkov addressed a parting word to the soldiers, asking them to be in battle together, when taking the village, not to get carried away with collecting trophies and not scatter, as this could lead to a disruption of the operation. He also recalled that the worst enemy of the Ural Cossacks, Chapaev, is in Lbi-shchensk, who mercilessly destroyed the prisoners, that he escaped twice from their hands - in October 1918 and in April 1919, but the third time he must be eliminated. After that, we read a common prayer and set off. We approached 3 versts to the village and lay down, waiting for dawn. According to the plan to capture Lbischensk, Poznyakov's soldiers attacked the middle of the stanitsa, which stretched along the Urals, most of the Cossacks had to act on the flanks, 300 Cossacks remained in reserve. Before the start of the attack, the participants in the assault were given grenades, the commanders of hundreds received orders: upon occupying the outskirts of Lbischensk, collect hundreds of platoons, instructing each platoon to clear one of the sides of the street, having with them a small reserve in case of unexpected counterattacks. The enemy suspected nothing, the village was quiet, only the dog barked. At 3 o'clock in the morning, still in the darkness, the white lines moved forward.
The scouts who came forward captured the red guards. Without a single shot, the outskirts of the village were occupied, the detachment began to be drawn into the streets. At that moment, a rifle salvo rang out into the air - it was a Red guard who was at the mill and who noticed the advance of the Whites from it. He immediately fled. The "cleansing" of Lbischensk began. According to the participant in the battle, Esaul Faddeev, "courtyard after courtyard, house after house" was cleared "by platoons, those who surrendered were peacefully sent to the reserve. Grenades flew into the windows of houses, from where fire was opened at the White Guards, but most of the Reds, taken by surprise, surrendered without resistance. Six regimental commissars were captured in one house. Participant in the battle Pogodaev described the capture of six commissars in the following way; "… One's jaw jumps. They are pale. Two Russians are more calm. But their eyes are doomed. They look at Borodin with fear. Their trembling hands reach for their visors. Salute. It turns out ridiculous. The caps are red. stars with hammer and sickle, no shoulder straps on overcoats, "There were so many prisoners that at first they were shot, fearing an uprising on their part. Then they began to drive them into one crowd. The soldiers of the special detachment, having covered the village, gradually converged to its center. A wild panic began among the Reds, in their underwear they jumped out through the windows into the street and rushed in different directions, not understanding where to run, as shots and noise were heard from all sides. Those who managed to grab a weapon fired randomly in different directions, but there was little harm from such shooting for the whites - mainly the Red Army men themselves suffered from it.
How Chapaev died
A special platoon, allocated for the capture of Chapaev, broke through to his apartment - headquarters. The captured Red Army soldier did not deceive the Cossacks. At this time, the following happened near Chapaev's headquarters. The commander of the special platoon Belonozhkin immediately made a mistake: he did not cordon off the whole house, but immediately led his people into the headquarters yard. There, the Cossacks saw a horse sitting at the entrance to the house, which someone was holding inside by the reins, thrust through the closed door. Silence was the answer to Belonozhkin's order for those in the house to leave. Then he fired into the house through the skylight. The frightened horse dashed to the side and dragged out from behind the door of the Red Army man who was holding him. Apparently, it was Chapaev's personal orderly Pyotr Isaev. Everyone rushed to him, thinking that this was Chapaev. At this time, the second person ran out of the house to the gate. Belonozhkin shot him with a rifle and wounded him in the arm. This was Chapaev. In the ensuing confusion, while almost the entire platoon was occupied by the Red Army, he managed to escape through the gate. In the house, except for two typists, no one was found. According to the testimony of the prisoners, the following happened: when the Red Army men rushed to the Urals in panic, they were stopped by Chapaev, who rallied around a hundred soldiers with machine guns, and led a counterattack on Belonozhkin's special platoon, which had no machine guns and was forced to retreat. Having knocked out the special platoon from the headquarters, the Reds sat down behind its walls and began to shoot back. According to the prisoners, during a short battle with a special platoon, Chapaev was wounded again in the stomach. The wound turned out to be so severe that he could no longer lead the battle and was transported on boards across the Urals, Sotnik V. Novikov, who was watching the Urals, saw how someone was transported across the Urals against the center of Lbischensk just before the end of the battle. According to eyewitnesses, on the Asian side of the Ural River, Chapaev died from a wound in the stomach.
Party committee resistance
Esaul Faddeev saw a group of Reds appear from the side of the river, counterattacking the Whites and settling in the headquarters. This group covered the crossing of Chapaev, trying at all costs to detain the whites, whose main forces had not yet approached the center of Lbischensk, and Chapaev was missed. The defense of the headquarters was led by its chief, 23-year-old Nochkov, a former officer of the tsarist army. By this time, the detachment, which had settled down in the headquarters, with brutal machine-gun and rifle fire paralyzed all attempts by the Whites to seize the center of Lbischensk. The headquarters was in such a place that all approaches to the center of the village were shot from it. After several unsuccessful attacks, Cossacks and soldiers began to accumulate outside the walls of neighboring houses. The Reds recovered, began to stubbornly defend themselves and even made several attempts to counterattack the White ones. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses of the battle, the shooting was such that no one even heard the commander's orders. At this time, part of the communists and soldiers of the red convoy (firing squad) led by Commissar Baturin, who had nothing to lose, with a machine gun occupied the party committee on the outskirts of the village, repulsing the attempts of the whites to cover Chapaev's headquarters from the other side. On the third side, the Urals flowed with a high bank. The situation was so serious that a hundred Cossacks, blocking the road from Lbischensk, was pulled up to the village and several times attacked by the party committee, but rolled back, unable to withstand the fire.
Red headquarters taken
At this time, the Cossacks of the cornet Safarov, seeing the delay at the headquarters, quickly jumped out on a cart 50 steps from him, hoping to suppress the resistance with machine-gun fire. They did not even manage to turn around: the horses that were carrying the cart, and everyone in it, were immediately killed and wounded. One of the wounded remained in the cart under the lead rain of the Reds. The Cossacks tried to help him, running out from around the corners of the houses, but they met the same fate. Seeing this, General Borodin led his headquarters to his rescue. The houses were almost cleared of the Reds, but a Red Army soldier was hiding in one of them, who, seeing the general's shoulder straps flashing in the morning sun, fired a rifle. The bullet hit Borodin in the head. This happened when the Reds no longer had any hope of keeping the village behind them. Colonel Sladkov, who took command of the special detachment, ordered the special machine-gun platoon to take the house where Baturin sat down, and then take possession of the red headquarters. While some distracted the Reds, conducting a firefight with them, others, taking two Lewis light machine guns, climbed onto the roof of a neighboring, higher building. After some half a minute, the resistance of the party committee was broken: machine guns of the Cossacks turned the roof of his house into a sieve, killing most of the defenders. At this time, the Cossacks pulled up the battery. The Reds could not stand the shelling and fled to the Urals. The headquarters was taken. The wounded Nochkov was thrown, he crawled under the bench, where he was found and killed by the Cossacks.
Losses of the Chapaevites
The only and major omission of the organizers of the Lbischensky raid was that they did not timely ferry a detachment to the other side of the Urals that could destroy all the fugitives. Thus, for a long time, the Reds would not have known about the catastrophe in Lbischensk, continuing to send carts through it to Sakharnaya, which would invariably be intercepted by the White Guards. During this time, it was possible to surround and eliminate the unsuspecting red garrisons of not only Sakharnaya, but also Uralsk, thereby causing the collapse of the entire Soviet Turkestan front … A pursuit was sent after the few who crossed the Urals, but they were not caught up. By 10 o'clock on September 5, the organized resistance of the Reds in Lbischensk was broken, and by 12 o'clock in the afternoon the battle ceased. In the area of the village, they counted up to 1,500 killed Reds, 800 were taken prisoner. Many drowned or were killed while crossing the Urals and on the other side.
In the next 2 days of the Cossacks' stay in Lbischensk, about a hundred more red hiding in attics, cellars, hayloft were caught. The population betrayed them all without exception. P. S. Baturin, the commissar of the 25th division, who replaced Furmanov, hid under a stove in one of the huts, but the hostess gave him up to the Cossacks. According to the most conservative estimates, during the Lbischensky battle, the Reds lost at least -2500 killed and captured. The total losses of whites during this operation were 118 people - 24 killed and 94 wounded. The most grievous loss for the Cossacks was the death of the valiant General Borodin. Knowing nothing about the battle, large red carts, rear offices, staff workers, a school of red cadets, and a punitive "special task force", sadly "famous" for decossackization, soon came to the village. From the surprise, they were so confused that they did not even have time to offer resistance. All of them were immediately captured. The cadets and the "special task force" were almost completely chopped up with sabers.
The trophies taken in Lbischensk turned out to be huge. Ammunition, food, equipment for 2 divisions, a radio station, machine guns, cinematographic devices, 4 airplanes were captured. On the same day, one more was added to these four. The red pilot, not knowing what had happened, sat down in Lbischensk. There were other trophies as well. Colonel Izergin tells about them as follows: “In Lbischensk, Chapaev's headquarters was located not without convenience and pleasant pastime: among the prisoners - or trophies - there was a large number of typists and stenographers. Obviously, in the red headquarters they write a lot … "" He rewarded himself. " Instead of a cap, he had a pilot's helmet on his head, and five orders of the Red Banner adorned his chest from one shoulder to the other. "What the hell, what a masquerade, Kuzma ?! Do you wear the Red Order ?!" - Myakushkin asked him menacingly. "Yes, I took off my rubber cap from the Soviet pilot, and we got these orders at the Chapayev headquarters. There are several boxes of them … The guys took as much as they wanted … The prisoners say: Chapay was just sent to the Red Army for battles, but he did not have time to distribute them - we then they came … But how, in a fair fight, he earned. They should have worn Petka and Ma-karka, and now - the Cossack Kuzma Potapovich Minovskov wears …
Wait, when you will be rewarded, - he rewarded himself, "the soldier replied. Nikolai marveled at the inexhaustible cheerfulness of his Cossack and let him go …" who removed the most "vigilant fighters of the revolution" - the red cadets from the guard, and that during the battle in Lbischensk itself a mutiny was raised by the inhabitants of the village at the most inopportune moment for the Bolsheviks, and that warehouses and institutions were seized immediately. Not a single document speaks in favor of Furmanov's arguments. Firstly, it was impossible to put the cadets on guard, since they simply were not in Lbischensk on September 4, because they did not have time to arrive there and arrived when it was all over. Secondly, in Lbischensk, only children, decrepit old people and women remained in the number of inhabitants, and all men were in the ranks of whites. Thirdly, the prisoners told about where the Red posts are and in what place are the most important points. As the reasons for the complete success of the whites, one should note the highest professionalism of the White Guard command and officers, the dedication and heroism of the rank and file, and the carelessness of Chapaev himself. Now about the "discrepancies" between the film and the book "Chapaev". This article was written using archival materials. "Why then was it possible to deceive the people with the beautiful death of Chapay?" - the reader will ask. It's simple. A hero like Chapaev, in the opinion of the Soviet authorities, should have died like a hero. It was impossible to show that he almost fell asleep in captivity and was in a helpless state taken out of the battle and died of a wound in the stomach. It turned out somehow ugly. In addition, there was a party order: to expose Chapaev in the most heroic light! For this, they invented a white armored car that did not really exist, which he allegedly threw grenades from the headquarters. If there were armored cars in the white detachment, it would have been immediately opened, since the noise of the engines in the silence of the night can be heard in the steppe for many kilometers! Conclusions What was the significance of the Lbischen special operation?
First, it showed that the actions of a relatively small number of special forces in one strike, which took a total of 5 days, can negate the two-month efforts of the enemy many times superior. Secondly, results were achieved that are difficult to obtain by conducting military operations "as usual": the headquarters of the entire military group of the Red Army of the Turkestan Front was destroyed, there was a break in communication between the Red troops and their demoralization, which forced them to flee to Uralsk. As a result, the Reds were thrown back to the lines, from where they launched their offensive against the Urals in July 1919. The moral significance for the Cossacks of the very fact that at every meeting boasting crushing victories over the Urals (in fact, not a single Cossack regiment was defeated by them) Chapaev was destroyed by their own hands, was truly enormous. This fact has shown that even the best red bosses can be successfully beaten. However, the repetition of such a special operation in Uralsk was prevented by the inconsistency of actions between the commanders, the catastrophic development of the typhus epidemic among the personnel and a sharp increase in the Red forces on the Turkestan front, who were able to recover only after 3 months due to the collapse of the Kolchak front.
